


Something I Can't See

by hulklinging



Series: children of the atomic barricade [1]
Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Mutants, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-06
Updated: 2015-04-06
Packaged: 2018-03-21 15:20:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3697187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hulklinging/pseuds/hulklinging
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jehan collects origin stories like poetry, wants his friends and their stories to be remembered. They're going to be heroes, after all. They're going to change the world.</p>
<p>Takes place before Cross the Line, in the same universe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something I Can't See

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for descriptions of being burnt alive (in a vision). No one actually dies.

As far as origin stories go, his wasn't one for the books. He woke up one morning to bright lights and a sense of what tomorrow will bring. There is never any doubt in his mind that what he sees is real. He knows it like he knows the world is beautiful, even though he had never seen it. So no, his origin story is hardly worth the time it would take to tell it, a footnote at the bottom of a page filled with his friends and their heroics. He’s much more interested in those around him, collects origin stories like he collects poems, typing them up and tucking them away in a box full of memories. He doesn’t really need to write them down, remembers every one as clearly as the day he was told it. But writing has a kind of permanence that he can’t promise. He draws comfort in knowing that even if something were to happen to him, his stories, the ones he’s written and the ones he’s carefully collected, are safe.

He doesn’t realize he has heard almost everyone’s until halfway through Marius telling him his own mutant awakening. He hadn’t meant to pry. He’s just a good listener.

If Marius notices his attention wander briefly, he doesn’t make it known. Jehan focuses again on the boy, his sheepish smile leaking into his voice as he talks about what suddenly having wings feels like.

“I had this crazy back pain for weeks, and then my skin started to rip open? It wasn’t very poetic, Jehan, you sure you want to be taking notes?”

“I did ask! I’m curious. I’ve never grown wings, after all. Do you mind telling me?”

“Well, no. Not really. It feels good to talk about it, actually. No one’s really asked before.”

And he talks about learning to fly, and Jehan can’t see his face in this moment but he’s hit with a glimpse of Marius in the future, beaming, sun catching his hair like fire, and he shares his friend’s joy.

How his father reacted comes later in their friendship, is less of a sharing of a secret and more of a lancing of a wound.

“He didn’t even look at me. Maybe he couldn’t? He just… Let me know I was no longer welcome at home. There was no room for a mutant in Grandpa’s boardroom.”

Jehan doesn’t know rejection like that, but it’s common enough among his friends. He’s one of the lucky ones, waking up one morning with a clear vision of himself, a student at this school. By the next morning, he was enrolled and packed and the fact that he was about to move halfway across the country to go to a school he’d only dreamt of hardly scared him at all. He could still feel the happiness that his future self had felt, standing on the steps of the Institute. There were friends waiting for him there, important ones, and his parents were fretting enough without him allowing his anxieties to leak into the mix.

The moment he had walked through the front doors, he knew he’d made the right choice. The friendships would come slowly, some of the characters he had seen had not yet reached this setting, but the happiness was immediate. This is where he was supposed to be.

He meets Bossuet first, who he saw as silver lines and silver lining. Bossuet is from Wakanda by way of New York, had an American mother who sent him to Xavier’s as soon as his mutation showed itself to be more of a curse than anything else.

“She disappeared after that, her and dad went on a trip home and never came back.”

He says it like a matter of fact, and there’s no question in his mind that they would have come back to him if they could, that bad luck must have cut their journey short. He may be the first known mutant in his family, but the bad luck’s been there for generations.

“We must have pissed off a god or a witch, somewhere along the line.”

The bad luck doesn’t bother him, though. He came to terms with it long before his mutation showed its face. He had two years on Jehan’s young fourteen, but is a seasoned veteran of the school, been here since he was twelve, an old soul. He doesn’t mind Jehan carefully tracing the lines of his tattoos, piecing together the shape of him.

“What happens? If you actually use your powers?”

Jehan, in his very small world of before, had heard of mutations that hurt and hindered, but had a hard time imagining them. His mutation was a gift, and in the black and white worlds of youth, he couldn’t see that changing, couldn’t see why the future might not always be something he wants to know. His friend in front of him is a reality check, Bossuet’s kind aura and bright words a necessity, his super strength slowly breaking his body apart, held together with tattoos from a homeland he can’t really remember and promises of control and comfort helping the process slow.

Bossuet laughs. Jehan loves that, that he laughs even when he’s talking about dark things. It means he gets to bathe in the present, no accidental glimpses of just how long the treatments were buying his friend (not long enough, no life was long enough for a personality like Bossuet’s, but that’s life, isn’t it?).

“It happens a lot, unfortunately. If I trip, or accidentally touch something without paying much attention. I get really big, and if I really overdo it, they have to redo the tattoos.”

The tattoos are made of a special metal, vibranium, and they feel strange to the touch. Bossuet admits he can’t feel Jehan touching them, he can’t really feel anything, his sense of touch all but destroyed by his powers. “It’s why I have to be so careful. I wouldn’t know if I hit someone unless I saw it.” It also explains why the boy is so clumsy. But he treats that like he treats every misfortune that comes his way, with a chuckle and an apology. The calm acceptance he has about his own looming mortality amazes Jehan. For him, death is a void, true blindness. The first time he looked into someone’s future and saw death, he was sick for a week.

“I’ll warn you,” Jehan promises. “I’ll watch, and when I see it I’ll warn you, and then we can stop it.”

If Bossuet finds the slip of a boy’s offer of protection funny, he doesn’t let on. Instead, there’s that brightness again, that burning optimism that warms Jehan like sunlight. Jehan looks as deep as he knows how, falls into that optimism and comes out seeing gold. He says as much to Bossuet, who likes the idea.

“Gold like hair? Or actual metal?”

“Just gold,” Jehan says. After that, he notices the gold at the edges of everything, every glimpse into his friend’s future that he is given.

Bossuet needs his own room, to minimize the risk of accidentally hurting himself or others. Jehan has no roommate either, for the first few months. Powers or no, he can’t see in the traditional sense, so he has time to memorize the place without someone else’s presence taking up space. Then comes Courfeyrac.

Jehan wakes up smiling, and when he meets the boy who will be his new roommate, he knows he was the cause. His happiness is contagious. Literally.

“Sorry about that.” Courfeyrac has a voice that seems to bounce. He’s not the best at sitting still, and Jehan gives up on trying to keep track of where exactly he is. “I’ll learn to control it as quick as I can! That’s why we’re here, after all.”

Courfeyrac has pheromone powers, ‘empathic pherokinesis’, and hasn’t quite grasped how to control them yet. Like, at all.

“I musta had them for a while before anyone noticed,” Courfeyrac is fidgeting on his new bed, and it takes little prompting from Jehan for him to start talking about how he got here. He seems like he was itching to talk about it. “I try to be a happy guy, I don’t really do sad, if I can help it. But we were watching this movie in class and I guess it really got to me? So there I was, trying not to cry, and I guess this struck everyone as funny, because everyone was snickering, and that made me more upset, so I stopped trying to hold in the tears, you know? And I guess I was also instinctively holding in my power, cause I felt this weird tingling, like when your leg falls asleep, but inside my chest. And then," and his voice, kind and vibrant,  takes on a smug undertone. "The entire class starts sobbing."

He admits that he doesn't know whether his parents took it so well because they were actually okay with their mutant son, or because he'd been manipulating them without meaning to.

He does get better at recognizing when he's using his powers, almost immediately. What is slower in coming is control. Jehan is plagued with sudden visions of futures further than he usually looks, carried by the intense emotions Courfeyrac unwillingly leaks. They last three weeks, before Jehan nervously mentions he's thinking about requesting a room change.

Courfeyrac surprises him with a wave of relief. "I've been so worried I'll leave something in your way and blind you- well, not blind you, I guess, but future blind you? Seerblock you?- at the same time and then you'd fall and you'd hate me and I think you're cool so that would be sad."

Jehan smiles at the excitable boy. "And you don't do sad often."

"Right!"

What's really surprising is that even after Courfeyrac moves out ("It was your room first! I can't kick you out. I'm not even unpacked, it's fine!") he still hangs out with Jehan. Courfeyrac must see some shock on his face, when he first opens the door and Courfeyrac greets him with a cheery hello and the smell of popcorn.

"I hope it's okay I invited myself over!" A gentle touch on Jehan's elbow, because for all his worries about being hard for Jehan to navigate around, he's always so conscious of things others seem to forget. Like how Jehan can't always see who will be on the other side of a door, or which way someone will turn to get around him. Courfeyrac is loud on purpose, and he grounds himself with little touches, like a hand on a shoulder, or like now, pressure on his elbow as he passes the taller boy. Jehan doesn't know how to express his gratefulness aside from returning the favour, this time with a side hug that Courfeyrac returns enthusiastically. He has the Sight, which is wonderful, but it is by no means conventional sight. In the everyday mundane events he still struggles, his powers almost working as a crutch as he tries to keep sharp the skills that helped him navigate the world before his Sight manifested. Courfeyrac's instinctive helping hand might be unwelcome to most, but Jehan, surrounded by those who usually err on the side of treating him like any other sighted student, and a best friend who is too afraid to risk a touch, welcomes it.

"We're watching a movie," he says, happiness replacing surprise. "Have you meet Bossuet?"

They hadn't met, but Jehan sees friendship almost immediately, and can safely predict that his two friends will get along just fine.

Movie nights become a weekly ritual, the three of them taking advantage of the empty bed in Jehan’s room. They watch silly movies, or scary ones, and Courfeyrac acts as narrator for the visually impaired, and if they all start to cry because Courfeyrac is maybe a little bit of a sap, they don’t tease him for it. Much. It’s a good arrangement, the highlight of most weeks, and that says a lot, because his life was pretty great all around. He has friends he loves and classes that suit him and he’s even learning how to give what he sees more direction, working on making the future clearer, what he sees from moment to moment more consistent.

Jehan has just celebrated his fifteenth birthday when they meet Feuilly. Feuilly’s is one origin story he doesn’t need to ask. Instead, he watches it go up in flames.

That day, Jehan wakes up before his alarm. He’s gasping, skin prickling.

“Fire,” he whispers. In his panic, he can’t tell if the fire is here or somewhere else entirely, now or in the future. He stumbles to the door, skin still burning, and somehow makes it to Courfeyrac’s door. He doesn’t know why he goes to Courfeyrac, Bossuet is closer, but that’s where he sees himself, so that’s where he goes. Courfeyrac opens the door after a few seconds of Jehan’s frenzied knocking. He’s gasping for breath, fire everywhere, smoke in his lungs, and he all but collapses into his friend’s arms.

“Jehan?” Courfeyrac’s fear cuts through the fire for a second, before twisting together with the flames, making them grow even higher. He smells hair burning, hears skin pop. Jehan whimpers.

“Jehan, what is it? What’s wrong?”

“Fire,” he gasps, scrambling for something, anything to ground him. “We’re burning, we’re on fire, help us.”

Courfeyrac’s hand finds his and squeezes. “There’s no fire, you’re okay, just breathe.” His voice is steady, but his own power betrays his terror. “Is the fire going to be here? Can you see what’s around you, Jehan?”

He sees Courfeyrac. He sees another door opening, Courfeyrac’s neighbour, a voice he doesn’t know. There’s no fire here, not in these halls, not in the neighbour’s future. Jehan breathes deep, as the neighbour agrees to go get a teacher, takes off at a run.

“Not here,” he can finally get out. “Not here, but we’re there. You’ll be there. Be careful.”

Courfeyrac laughs. It’s forced, his fear spiking. Jehan’s drowning in fear and flames. Him, Courfeyrac, and a third. The stranger, who must be important, because they go into a burning building for him, because his future invaded Jehan’s dreams and is burnt into Jehan’s flesh, he can smell himself burning-

Calm.

Like the first step into fresh snow. Calm fills his lungs. The flames retreat.

Courfeyrac has managed his first controlled use of his powers, crumpled on the floor outside his room with his best friend in his arms. Calm. Even though he doesn’t feel it himself, he makes sure Jehan does.

The future shifts, and Jehan feels it happen. The fire is one step removed from him, now, less of a sure thing and more of a warning. He mentally takes stock of himself. He is fine, physically. His skin is untouched. The smell disappears. He mutters a thank you into Courfeyrac’s should, and by the time Logan arrives he’s trying to sort through the ash, pinpoint a when and a where.

“Can you do that again, Courfeyrac?” he asks, and feels that shift again, the one that means things are changing. Courfeyrac and Logan fall immediately silent. “Can you calm down a stranger? Because I think…” he wets his dry lips and realizes he just interrupted a teacher. A really scary one. He bites back his own shyness and rephrases. “I know a mutant’s about to lose control. Fire powers, in an apartment, somewhere downtown. He’s just a kid…”

This is the first time Jehan changes the future.

Logan doesn’t waste time doubting him. He goes to wake Storm, tell Mr. Summers him and some students are taking the jet and hoping to save some lives. Courfeyrac helps Jehan to his feet. Jehan knows he has to go, because he can see the apartment building but he doesn’t know where it is. He has to go, and so does Courfeyrac. Jehan knows this, has never been so sure, knows that if Courfeyrac doesn’t come they won’t save anyone, but he still hates to ask him.

“Sorry,” he whispers to Courfeyrac, as they get into the jet. Courfeyrac just nods, a jerky movement Jehan can feel as his friend deposits him into a seat. Storm takes the pilot’s position, and as the Blackbird comes to life underneath them, Wolverine addresses them both.

“There are spare suits back there,” he says, gruff but not unkind. “They’ll help with heat, if we get there and the fire’s already lit.”

The fire won’t be lit, Jehan wants to say, but he doesn’t know what he’s seeing, a flame always burning, that won’t go out no matter how hard he tries, and he tries to avoid sleep but this time he can’t and the flame gets too big, too fast-

He’s missing out on what Wolverine is saying. He snaps out of the vision and its heat, and tries to listen.

“-what it’s worth, sorry. Your first mission isn’t supposed to be like this.” He laughs. “Welcome to the X-Men.”

The line resonates in Jehan’s ears, and a fact appears, like they sometimes do. Not a vision, just a sure thing that he now knows. Logan calls this his first mission, but he knows, deep inside of him, that this will also be his last mission as an X-Man.

He shivers, and shoves that truth away. He doesn’t dare to glance into his future, now. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if there’s nothing there.

**Author's Note:**

> For those not familiar with Academy X/New X-Men, here are the characters who's powers I borrowed from for this universe -
> 
> Bossuet - Gentle aka Nezhno Abidemi  
> Courfeyrac - Wallflower aka Laurie Collins  
> Jehan - Blindfold aka Ruth Aldine
> 
> Liberties have been taken and tweaks have been made. If you have more questions to better understand what's going down, or you just wanna chat, I'm [here](http://hulklinging.tumblr.com) on tumblr!


End file.
